Social media comprises any medium, network, channel, or technology for facilitating communication between a large number of individuals and/or entities (users). Some common examples of social media are Facebook or Twitter, each of which facilitates communications in a variety of forms between large numbers of users (Facebook is a trademark of Facebook, Inc. in the United States and in other countries. Twitter is a trademark of Twitter Inc. in the United States and in other countries.) Social media, such as Facebook or Twitter allow users to interact with one another individually, in a group, according to common interests, casually or in response to an event or occurrence, and generally for any reason or no reason at all.
Some other examples of social media are websites or data sources associated with radio stations, news channels, magazines, publications, blogs, and sources or disseminators of news or information. Some more examples of social media are websites or repositories associated with specific industries, interest groups, action groups, committees, organizations, teams, or other associations of users.
Data from social media comprises unidirectional messages, or bi-directional or broadcast communications in a variety of languages and forms. Such communications in the social media data can include proprietary conversational styles, slangs or acronyms, urban phrases in a given context, formalized writing or publication, and other structured or unstructured data.
A user's contributions or interactions with the social media can include any type or size of data. For example, a user can post text, pictures, videos, links, or combinations of these and other forms of information to a social media website. Furthermore, such information can be posted in any order, at any time, for any reason, and with or without any context. Thus, a user's interactions with a social media can be regarded as unstructured data.
For example, one user posts an image on social media. Another user reacts or interacts with that post by commenting about the image. For example, the reacting user may indicate a liking or dislike of certain items or entities that are depicted in the image.
Hereinafter, an item, object, place, or thing that is depicted in an image or video, and is not a person or a human face, is referred to herein as an entity. Still pictures, sketches, line-art, graphics, icons, video, and other similarly purposed graphical or visual data that can be posted on social media is collectively and interchangeably referred to herein as an “image”.
A comment is textual data contributed by a social media user in the context of—i.e., in relation to—an image posted on the social media. For example, suppose an image posted by one user depicts a person in an office environment. As an example, a close friend's comment, “I like your hair” is in the context of the image because the comment relates to the hair of the person depicted in the image. The hair of the person is an entity as described herein. As another example, a friend's comment, “Hey, can we meet this weekend?” is not in the context of the image because the comment relates to the user who posted the image and not to an entity depicted in the image. As another example, a close friend's comment “I liked your other dress better” is in the context of the image because the comment relates to the person's depicted dress entity because the comment is comparing the depicted dress entity relative to another dress that need not be depicted in the image.
As another example, a friend's comment, “You seem to be liking working there” is in the context of the image because the comment relates to the identity badge that is depicted as attached to a belt the person in the image is wearing, or to a company logo that may be in the background of the image. The badge and the logo are entities as described herein. Other non-limiting examples of entities that provide context to the comments can generally be any inanimate objects, foreground objects, background objects, colors, and shapes other than human faces.
The comments are expressed in a natural language. A natural language is a written or a spoken language having a form that is employed by humans for primarily communicating with other humans or with systems having a natural language interface.
Natural language processing (NLP) is a technique that facilitates exchange of information between humans and data processing systems. For example, one branch of NLP pertains to transforming human readable or human understandable content into machine usable data. For example, NLP engines are presently usable to accept input content such as a social media post or human speech, and produce structured data—such as an outline of the input content, most significant and least significant parts, a subject, a reference, dependencies within the content, and the like, from the given content.
Shallow parsing is a term used to describe lexical parsing of a given content using NLP. For example, given a sentence, an NLP engine determining what the sentence semantically means (context) according to the grammar of the language of the sentence is the process of lexical parsing, to wit, shallow parsing. In contrast, deep parsing is a process of recognizing the relationships, predicates, or dependencies, and thereby extracting new, hidden, indirect, or detailed structural information from distant content portions in a given document or some corpora.
A sentiment of a given content can be determined using NLP. For example, by performing NLP on the content of a post, it can be determined whether the content expresses a favorable or unfavorable sentiment about a subject. As an example, a close friend's post, “I like your hair,” can be parsed using NLP to determine that the post has a favorable sentiment towards a person's hair in an image, whereas “Those glasses don't work” post can be parsed using NLP to determine that the post has an unfavorable sentiment towards the eyewear a person might be wearing in an image.